Category: News

Data preparation outfit Trifacta has signed up Malwarebytes for its Wrangler product to automate its marketing.

Malwarebytes is using the product to accelerate the process of onboarding marketing data and take action on their data faster, all with minimal IT support. Because of the automation that Trifacta provides, Malwarebytes has eliminated the associated errors of manually preparing data in Excel.

Director of Data Science and AI at Malwarebytes Darren Chinen said that the outfit’s marketing team generates leads from a variety of marketing activities, and each new batch of leads they receive needs correcting, standardising, and enriching before it can be onboarded into our marketing automation platform.

“Under an Excel-driven process, the team was spending days or even weeks to manually correct lead data, and the delay put our company at risk of losing prospective clients. After implementing Trifacta, we’ve been able to automate much of the process so that the marketing team merely visually inspects and makes slight alterations to the data at hand. We have seen dramatic efficiency gains — in the past three months alone we were able to onboard 40,000 leads, which would have required six months.”

Marketing teams have long struggled to take action on their marketing data and marketing leads. Data is sourced from different channels — ranging from webinars and events to social media or AdRoll data.

The ability to standardise the miscellaneous data in half the time it takes by using spreadsheets enables marketers to swiftly identify actionable leads and marketing performance insights to grow their business.

According to CSO Insights, 60 percent of forecasted deals do not close, and unsurprisingly the same report goes on to say that one in four companies are unhappy with this outcome. To increase customer conversion, companies need to focus on creating accurate data to ensure their resources are being optimised for the right leads.

EMEA distributor Nuvias has opened a 13,504 sq. ft. new EMEA HQ at Woking, Surrey.

The move is the latest step in the rapid growth of the company, following its foundation in 2015.

Nuvias CEO Paul Eccleston said: “The new EMEA HQ in Woking is part of our ongoing plans for growth and increased EMEA reach. It will be a focal point for EMEA-wide activities and a centre for training and development, as well as a location for hosting strategic meetings with our customers and vendor partners. It is available as a resource centre for all our partners.”

Turnover at Nuvias is now more than $ 500 million, with an increase across the board of some 13.1 percent in the last financial year. The Advanced Networking and Cyber Security Practices each increased by 12 percent and the Unified Communications Practice by 18 percent.

Eccleston said: “We created Nuvias because the channel needed a new kind of EMEA distributor, to deal with the increasingly complex and diverse needs of the IT customer; the growth in demand for new technologies and emerging disruptive vendors; and the shift in how IT is consumed and provisioned. We’ve been working hard to help partners capitalise on the new opportunities presented by these changes.”

Nuvias has attracted many new vendors and extended its reach with existing vendors, all keen to take advantage of the company’s ethos, strong commitment to growth across EMEA, and ability to provide a consistently high level of value-added services across the region.

New vendor partners include Juniper Networks, Nokia, Malwarebytes, HID Global and BlueJeans. Existing vendors have extended their scope in EMEA with Nuvias, including Riverbed, Lifesize, ProLabs, Broadsoft, Polycom, AudioCodes, Oracle, Panasonic, Snom, VASCO, WatchGuard, Barracuda, Tintri and Kemp.

Since its foundation, Nuvias has also extended its geographical reach with new offices in Austria, Switzerland and South Africa, as well as upgrading Nuvias regional hub locations in Dubai, Germany and France. The company has won many press and vendor distributor awards in the last couple of years.1

Andy Nolan, Vice-President Sales at Lifesize, said: “We have been a long-time partner of Nuvias (formerly Zycko) and have moved forward substantially since Nuvias was established in 2015. We awarded Nuvias our EMEA Distributor of the Year 2017 title and Newcomer of the Year 2017 title for DACH. Lifesize now benefits from the many opportunities available from being part of the Nuvias UC Practice, and sales to Nuvias were up in 2017.”

Eccleston said: “When we started Nuvias, our vision was that by 2020, we would be the business that had redefined value distribution to the IT channel across EMEA, providing services and solutions to enable the channel and vendor community to deliver exceptional business value to their customers. We are now well on the way to fulfilling that aim.”

Cisco wants its channel partners to invest in their own intellectual property as a way of differentiating themselves from competitors.

The vendor gave its partners an innovation challenge and said that the partner deemed to have developed the best application on top of Cisco’s platform being awarded $100,000.

Speaking to the assorted throngs at its Partner Connection Week in the Bahamas, Cisco VP Nirav Sheth said: “I look at this whole concept of extensibility and programmability, and taking advantage of our APIs, as an opportunity for you to develop your own digital business.

“We are committed to open and extensible [technology] across the entire portfolio. You can increase your customer relevancy, develop new services offers and extend your reach and value.”

He said he would love it if partners turned into ISVs to resell and drive Cisco business. This would increase company valuations.

Cisco has been doing a lot to help partners come up with their innovations by providing APIs and software development kits to help develop their solutions.

The CEO of Puzzel Børge Astrup has been mulling over the outfit’s first year of operation and all the developments in the contact centre industry.

This time last year, Intelecom combined its contact centre, interactive mobile messaging and payments divisions to create a new organisation called Puzzel.

Astrup said that over the year the number of agents on the Puzzel platform was at an all-time high and the company now employs 150 people across six different countries. Some of that expansion was thanks to the transformation in the contact centre industry as a whole.

“Mobility, digitalisation and the need for speed have increased customer demand for fully integrated solutions that improve customer interactions. The number of communication channels and personal devices customers use is changing, but the requirement for fast and efficient response remains the same”, Astrup said.

Puzzel wanted to expand geographically to take advantage of international contact centres looking to manage their operations using one unified solution across multiple countries. At the same time, it sought to improve local support by adding new regional offices and expanding its channel network.

In September 2017, Puzzel appointed Petr Bocek as General Manager of Bulgarian operations and Director, Business Development Central and Eastern Europe. Bocek joined Puzzel from Telenor Bulgaria and was hired for his local knowledge. At the end of 2017 a new office was opened in Helsinki, Finland lead by Gunnar Aasen, Vice President Sales to complete support for Nordic customers across Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

In June 2017, Puzzel announced one of its most significant business wins when If, the leading insurance company in the Nordic and Baltic countries serving 3.6 million customers, created what it claims is Europe’s most significant cloud-based contact centre with 3,400 agents.

Astrup said that in the last year, Artificial Intelligence (AI) arrived in contact centres. Virtual assistants, digital assistants and Bots are regular guests at the self-service party and could potentially change the landscape forever. Puzzel is actively helping organisations to deploy Bots in their contact centres.

Puzzel is focused on introducing new technology which was easy-to-use delivered high levels of stability and security and promises to provide exceptional, multi-channel customer experiences for assisted and automated interactions. This year, we went one step further by creating a dedicated Innovation Team devoted to delivering more of these shifts in technology to the market. Automated customer service will be a focus for this team in the coming months, he said.

In response to demand for electronic card payments and mobility, Puzzel met its year-one objective and introduced Puzzel Pay. Using this new mobile-enabled debt collection and instant payment method, organisations can expect to deliver a seamless, improved customer experience, reduce the number of customer enquiries and lower financial costs with less invoicing and fewer unpaid claims, Bocek said.

It’s all a bit puzzling.